Last Thoughts on Law School

If you haven't seen it yet, my good friend and co-blogger Russ made a new post on our old blog. If you're thinking about going to law school or are already in, you definitely should check it out. You might not like it, but the man speaks the truth.

His post inspired me to write a few wrap-up thoughts on law school, seeing as how I am almost a year removed from it, and have a little more perspective. I don't practice law, and I didn't even take the bar. I have a job that I like, in an industry that interests me. I am very lucky. You can agree with me if you want, you can disagree with me if you want, and either way I'm fine. And probably right.

For most people, law school is a mistake. The size of that mistake varies from person to person, ranging from "ate the worm from the tequila bottle and felt like shit all weekend" to "knocked up my 1st cousin and felt like pushing her down a flight of stairs was the best remedy," and all points in between. I documented this on my old blog, so I see no need to go into any detail, but the people for whom law school is a smart decision are those people who know exactly what they are getting themselves into, and actually want it. Everyone else is chasing a pipe dream.

Everyone has something that exposes their inner nerd, and mine is economics. I love it, I wish I had just gone to grad school for that instead. Regardless, it doesn't take a PhD to tell you that the economics of law school are fucked up. And I mean, seriously fucked up. Michael Lewis should write a book on it. Let me lay it out there for you:

Anyone can go to law school. There are way too many law schools out there. Probably at least 100 too many, maybe more. And more open every year. If you have a degree from an accredited university and an LSAT over 140 (and if you can't get over a 140 on the LSAT that degree from an accredited university is probably fraudulent) you can find a school to accept you. Might not be your first choice, or second, or tenth, but if you want it enough, you can go. How is this at all selective or exclusive? Easy answer: it isn't. As a result...

The market is flooded with law school graduates. This is simple supply and demand. The demand for lawyers is low, compared to the supply of lawyers available. This is really the shit you cover on the first day of Macroeconomics. Every year, tens of thousands of freshly minted JDs come on the market, and there aren't enough jobs for them. They simply don't exist. This benefits legal employers, because they can pick and choose who they want for the select few open jobs, but this means the law grads are the ones being screwed over. In an macroeconomic sense, this isn't a problem, except...

Law school is fucking expensive. Even the shittiest of schools charge an arm and a leg for the right to attend. Now we're moving into microeconomics, which frankly, is more important to you, the individual. Prospective lawyers take on massive amounts of debt, usually well into the six figure range, to finance their education, and upon graduation, find little to no interest in their services. The "lucky" ones - those who attend a small number of elite schools, or who can graduate at the very top of their classes at the non elite schools- get to slave at a big firm for lots of money to pay off that debt. Some are stuck to fend off that bitch Sallie Mae while working relatively low playing legal jobs, and everyone else is strapped with debt, yet in the lawyers market, is virtually unemployable. This is hardly fair, but we forget...

Law schools are a business. The first goal of a business is to make money. By admitting more, less qualified students, or by creating new law schools, universities are simply exploiting another revenue stream. They don't care about the individual students. They care about the bottom line. Sure , they give lip service to caring about students, but that's all it is. Try this: go to your school, tell them you don't like your job options, and ask for a refund of your money. You already know what the reaction will be. They don't care about you, they care about your money. As long as you are paid in full, they're happy. If you happen to find success after, all the better, they'll use your story to sell it to future unsuspecting prospective students while conveniently ignoring all the grads who are working for low pay in shitty jobs, or can't find a law job at all. To me...

This sounds a lot like a scam. You put down a lot of money up front for a potential payoff, but they don't tell you the odds of winning that payoff. In fact, it could be argued that they even mislead you to think your chances are better than they are. You work hard for the right to pay that money, and at the end, for many, the payoff never comes. This sounds like a scam. I'm not saying that it is a real scam, like a pyramid scheme...but it sounds like one. And the beauty (and perhaps, genius) of it is, the people whom law school attracts are just the people who don't believe they can be scammed. They all think they're the exception. Not one of them believes they will be the one with huge debt and no real prospects. Otherwise, why would they do it?

One of the biggest cliches in law school is that lawyers aren't good at math. I'd add economics to that list. Sadly, for most of them, as I just demonstrated, it's true.